Dan White

Dan White (2 September 1946-21 October 1985) was a San Francisco city supervisor from 8 January to 10 November 1978. On 27 November 1978, White killed Mayor George Moscone and gay rights activist and fellow city supervisor Harvey Milk, and he was sentenced to just five years for voluntary manslaughter. He committed suicide in 1985 after his marriage failed.

Biography
Dan White was born on 2 September 1946 in Long Beach, California, the second of nine children. He was raised in a working-class Irish Catholic family in Visitacion Valley, San Francisco, and he was expelled from high school as a junior due to violent behavior. However, he became the valedictorian of Woodrow Wilson High School, and he served in the US Army from 1965 to 1971 during the Vietnam War, serving with the US 101st Airborne Division from 1969 to 1970. In 1972, he briefly worked as a security guard in Anchorage, Alaska, but he later returned to San Francisco and became a firefighter. In 1977, he was elected to the Board of Supervisors for the US Democratic Party, and the police and firefighter unions supported him. However, he was a conservative at heart, and he was opposed to homosexuals and pot smokers.

White had a cooperative relationship with fellow supervisor Harvey Milk for a few months, but he opposed the construction of a rehab center and resigned from the Board of Supervisors on 10 November 1978 because of the corrupt inner workings of San Francisco politics. On 14 November, he reversed his resignation, but his murder of Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk on 27 November 1978 ensured that he would not hold office again. Surpisingly, he was sentenced to just seven years in prison after his lawyer claimed that he had been driven to murder the two men by consuming too much junk food (hence the term "twinkie defense"), and he was released after just five years. However, his marriage failed and he became depressed, and he used a hose attached to his car's exhaust pipe to kill himself with carbon monoxide poisoning in his car in his garage on 21 October 1985.